Does High Speed Broadband Increase Economic Growth?

[Commentary] It’s a reasonable enough question: does the roll out of high speed broadband increase economic growth? If it does, if there’s more than just the private gains that users themselves capture then this might make a decent case for there to be subsidy of the installation of such national infrastructure. This paper from Arthur D Little and Ericsson (who, err, make broadband equipment so might safely be assumed to have an interest in the matter) claims that there is such an effect. It is absolutely true that if you build it they will come. We would undoubtedly find new things to do with 100 Mbits, even the 1 Gbit systems being tested in places. But we still do not know, we can only hope, that those new things would justify the costs of building such systems. We do know however, that the move from none to 2 Mbits, or from 256 k to 2 M, does indeed produce those growth dividends. Thus, in a world with constrained resources that is where we should be aiming our support. Not at all in laying fiber optic to every corner of the land: rather in putting in alternative, presumably mobile, solutions to the gaps in the current network.